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In the wake of nationwide protests, Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook have publicly stated their "support of the Black community." On the next Techtonic, Chris Gilliard discusses his recent Fast Company piece that explains how Big Tech companies profit from exploiting and harming the very communities they claim to support.

July 8, 2019: Dr. Chris Gilliard on surveillance and its effects on marginalized communities

Tonight, Chris Gilliard on how surveillance affects marginalized communities. His scholarship concentrates on privacy, institutional tech policy, digital redlining, and the re-inventions of discriminatory practices through data mining and algorithmic decision-making, especially as these apply to college students. He holds a PhD from Purdue University’s Rhetoric and Composition Program and currently teaches at Macomb Community College.

• Amazon Is Watching (Will Oremus, June 27): "Rekognition [is] a platform that uses machine learning to analyze images and video footage. Among other features, Rekognition offers the ability to match faces found in video recordings to a collection of faces in a database, as well as facial analysis technology that can pick out facial features and expressions. A 2018 report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) highlighted how Amazon has been marketing its face recognition capabilities to law enforcement agencies, and has partnerships under way with police in Orlando, Florida, and Washington County, Oregon."

• Facial Recognition Coming To Delta Gates At MSP (CBS, June 20): "Delta Air Lines announced it will give passengers who fly out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport the option to use facial recognition to board their flight instead of a standard boarding pass."

• WSJ article (June 20) on biometric technology in the home, what Chris & I discuss as "luxury surveillance." The articles states the tech is "expanding to every corner of the home, using body identifiers to open the door, say hello, unlock the wine cellar and reveal the screening room." Yes: everyone needs facial recognition for their wine cellar!

• Why You Can No Longer Get Lost in the Crowd (Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger in a NYT op-ed, April 17): "Facial recognition technology poses an immense danger to society because it can be used to overcome biological constraints on how many individuals anyone can recognize in real time. If its use continues to grow and the right regulations aren’t instituted, we might lose the ability to go out in public without being recognized by the police, our neighbors and corporations."

• Brainwash is a dataset of webcam images taken from the Brainwash Cafe in San Francisco: "The Brainwash dataset is unique because it uses images from a publicly available webcam that records people inside a privately owned business without their consent. No ordinary cafe customer could ever suspect that their image would end up in dataset used for surveillance research and development, but that is exactly what happened to customers at Brainwash Cafe in San Francisco. Although Brainwash appears to be a less popular dataset, it was notably used in 2016 and 2017 by researchers affiliated with the National University of Defense Technology in China for two research projects on advancing the capabilities of object detection to more accurately isolate the target region in an image."

For books on surveillance, see also: smile.amazon.com...
(My use of an Amazon link is a bit sarcastic... but if any of you *do* buy this book there, choose Auricle Communications a.k.a. WFMU as the Smile beneficiary!)

6:15pm
JerryH:

Lag is killing me. Any tips on best way to listen via public wi-fi/chromebook?

Oh, shoot, I've missed a good show. In the event nobody mentioned it, here's a fun read about ways to upset surveillance and other challenges to privacy: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/obfuscation It's kind of like a high-tech Steal This Book.

Like the ones with the commercials that boast you can remotely see criminals and yell at them (while presumably being spied on yourself)?

6:51pm
Vanessa bikes:

there was an incident in my town, Long Hill township a few weeks ago. a neighbor's Ring alerted them and captured video a person wearing a mask, hood pulled up and gloves, trying there door at 4am. this lead to the pursuit and capture of 5 people 4 under age (and unarmed) who had stolen a car and a puppy. this seems like a good use.. but still not getting one for my house.